Hiya R,
I’ve had a good few days.
Aside from doing some work to keep me ticking over, I have been in the outhouse and store, dragging out nearly a decade of files, paperwork, patent issues, prototypes and very early scribbled notes regarding … you know what.
I just dragged boxes into the lounge, stacked them up and then started processing, (some), stuff through my printer scanner.
I’ve been finding all sorts and it has been making my heart bounce out my chest … touch of the panics (anxiety) too … first time for several years but … phew … as I write this, for the first time in over a decade, a reasonable amount of material to do with the venture is now stacked up in folders and files, boxes and columns, according to year, type or significance.
I found a hand written card from Sophie, who would have been about eight or nine back then … and it made me recall something I just never ever wanted to have in my head ever again.
“Daddy. Most inventors don’t have children, do they?” she stated quite nonchalantly.
That’s a littl girl aware that Daddy is not like other daddy’s. Not giving her the attention we assume she knows she is missing out on …….. (pause) ……..
Yet, saying that … perhaps she was even ‘turning it round’ to offer Daddy support by kind of acknowledgingthat …”I know you’d be a more loving daddy if That Thing wasn’t stealing all your time frommummy, Olly and me”
🙁
Whatever it meant, that memory came out of my outhouse yesterday, one of hundredcs, thousands still wrapped up in the venture.
Anyway …
Yep. Got lots of stuff sorted out.
One day I’ll tell you about ‘the industrial theft’ that stole 5 years worth of documents and, far more devastatingly, a complete video diary of the venture since it began
There was no net to talk of back then. Goodness, the PC was the 486 with 4 meg of ram and no CD rom … it was just coming in.
Me? I was light years ahead, already using The Commodore Amiga and a hyperlink based Amiga software program called SCALA to produce links from one file to another identical, (in look and feel), to the links in web pages today.
More importantyly, I was aware of a new technology where … wait for this — it is incredible …
A technology where you could write (It is known as ‘Burning’) data to a CD. Yeah. Right. I nearly wet myself! 🙂
… and this was why I bought a Canon Hi 8 camcorder so that I could SAMPLE video footage, (and grab photos), from the camcorder and convert them to Amiga files to put into the new Scala hyperlink environment.
Now … I didn’t comprehend that such dats, photos or video files could ever be seen ‘online’ becasue, back then, ‘online’ was a case of using bulleting boards to request a driver file from your mate in Australia … via a console.
However, from day one of the Gravity Venture, EVERYTHING I did was recorded so, I believed, I could one day distribute the whole story via a CD stuck on the front of a magazine or by giving copies to others.
Hence … when the burglars broke in and stole the camera, banks of hi8 cassette tapes and other patent related stuff, I was utterly, utterly devastaed. (This happened after my backers and I fell out – in 1999, I think.
If you haven’t twigged why the story could possibly be seen as very amusing and worthy of ridicule, TV presenter, (and a**hole), Johnny Vaughan, had.
Hed thought a story that was running in all the redtops and The Guardian and The Indedent’s ‘Society’ column that week, needed repeating on The Big Breakfast’s early morning TV show.
The ex convict and former coke snorting presenter created a special show feature for the occasion … just to humiliate a stranger.
He named and sang it Irony Corner.
“An inventor who invented a ‘thief proof’ lock … had it stolen this week!” … sort of thing.
No, Mr Vaughn. An inventor who had spent the last 5 years busting his balls, sacrificing his career, spending half a million and ruining his 20 year marriage … only to see the whole shooting match crumble due to the incompetence of others … had his work stolen.
I’m digressing too much, R but, the other side of the coin is that having gotten over the trauma of seeing all this stuff again, I have an opportunity to ‘tell my story’ via the amazing net resources all of us now take for granted.
There will never be the hours of stolen footage that would have made fantastic viewing on some Youtube Gravity Channel I could set up but, looking at the stuff I have here, I have a feeling I can still produce something extra-ordinary.
The key was always wanting to do such a thing … and it is thanks to you that I’m even in the same room as some of this stuff, let alone planning to revisit some of it.
I have more notes to scan, more protypes and products to photograph and film and a lot of writing to ponder, I’ll not write as ‘potential author’ until the autumn or winter but I will harvest existing and rediscovered material and that will help shape chapters with titles but content as yet unwritten.
Garden Delights
Yesterday I cut the grass in preperation of the delivery of three large Hope and Anchor picnic tables, each able to seat 4 or 6 people. Although I kind of knew already, it was still a surprise to see how easily, space wise, the garden swallowed up these three additions to the master plan! 🙂
One picnic table on the newly seeded flat lawn half way down the garden. Another adjacent to the first and opposite the shed several feet on. Plus a third picnic table looking fantastic down in the Zen garden.
I also tried out my new professional style B & D strimmer, clearing the long grass around the seating area and then I raked the Z garden’s gravel.